Thursday, March 13, 2014

My first attempt at a Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge. Harder than I thought to keep it under 1,500 words. Might have to publish the original ending in another post.

Per the instructions,(http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/03/07/flash-fiction-challenge-must-contain/) my story had to include a talking cat and a train or plane ride:

The
Commute

“Excuse
me, you’re in meow seat.”

It was a somewhat
high voice, but gravelly, like a child with a pack-a-day habit. Like the
Munchkins that were spending their hard earned money at the Munchkin strip club
when Judy Garland showed up in Oz.

Jeff looked up
from Candy Crush. Standing in the aisle of the train was a cat, grey with black
stripes, yellow-green eyes looking up solemnly.
It blinked at Jeff. He blinked back, looked around, saw nobody. He
leaned toward the aisle to get a better glimpse.

“Your seat?” he
asked to nobody in particular. “I didn’t see anybody’s things.”

“Gotta go,” the
cat said into a Bluetooth in his ear, raising his paw to tap it off. “Meow you,
too.”

“You’re a cat.”

Silence.

“And you’re
talking.”

Jeff had never
known a cat could roll its eyes, but this one just did.

“Besides, you’ve
been on this side of the door for a full minute. Aren’t you going to meow to go
back out now?”

The cat’s pupils
dilated and re-focused. Ears twitched sideways, backwards, then forward. Pupils contracted from round and playful to vertical
coal strips. Pushing its back legs into
the ground, it pounced onto the top of the empty chair next to Jeff.

It walked along
the seat backs, half curling three times in an attempt to get comfortable
before finally stretching out along the entire back. The chair shook as the cat
licked its front leg to clean behind its ear. The tail twitched back and forth,
flicking Jeff’s ear in the process.

“I’d say I meow
you don’t mind, but I actually hope this meows you to the core.”

“Look, cat, I was
here first.”

“I get that.
You’re new here. I make this commute every day and that seat helps me wind down
from a rough day. Got to get home before
meow owner does, or else he worries I’m stuck in somebody’s garage or
something. To relax, I need some grooming, a comfortable setting. That’s why I
marked that seat.”

“Gross,” Jeff
fidgeted, sniffing around. “You peed on this?”

“Do I look like a
meowing dog?” the cat asked. “I rubbed my chin on it. It’s called pheromones.
You humans think you’re so smart.”

“You can’t claim a
seat the day before,” exclaimed Jeff, tired of being condescended to by a cat. “This
isn’t Cheers, you aren’t Norm.”

“Meow.”

Was that
acquiescence? A challenge? Jeff shook his head, trying to clear his mind, and
turned back toward his laptop. He reached for the Ziploc bags containing his
uneaten lunch. Maybe he was just hungry.

The cat’s paws
tapped the top of his head. He ignored
it, took a bite. The cat tapped again.

“Knock it off, stupid
cat.”

“Who meows tuna on
a train?”

Two things
happened simultaneously. The train darkened
as it entered a tunnel, while the paw hit Jeff for the third time. This time,
however, sharp claws poked into his scalp.
He jerked, from both surprise and pain, and claws scraped across his
scalp.

A furry noose
constricted around his throat.

Jeff twitched and
flailed. The laptop shattered to the floor while tuna salad spilled over the adjacent
seat. The armrest lodged into his side, leaving Jeff gasping for breath.

“Tail,” Jeff
gulped out loud. “It was just a tail.”

The train exited
the tunnel. As light filtered back in, Jeff saw himself, askew and akimbo
across two train seats. His arms were
flailing where the cat had been, which was now vacant.

Instead, the cat
peered down from the seatback in front of him.
Sitting on its back legs, it casually licked its right paw. Pupils
contracted whenever the tongue neared the protruding claw.

“Meow a sight.”

Jeff’s hand went
out to steady him, but landed directly into the tuna salad.

“You ever meow
Johnny Cash?”

Lick, stare, lick.

“I killed a man in
Reno just to watch him die? He wrote that about meow.”

“Stupid cat,” Jeff
responded. “That song is fifty years old. What are you, five?”

“Eight in cat years,
times seven, is fifty-six.”

“That… That… makes
no sense.”

“It was 1954. I was meowing from a kitten into
a cat. Let me meow you about it.”

The paw dropped. Eyes
lost their sparkle, the joy gone. The stone-cold glare that remained left
Jeff’s heart cold. His feline tormenter
had just crossed from Goldfinger to Hannibal.

“Bob. Meowing.
Barker.”

Jeff tensed as the
cat leapt, then relaxed when it wet the opposite direction. Sitting upright,
removing his hand from the fishy mayonnaise, he saw the cat as it jumped up
onto the most forward seat. After waiting a beat while the train straightened,
the cat flew directly onto the black rectangular button that opened the door,
then disappeared.

Jeff began to
shake when the door closed, finally realizng the fight-or-flight mode his body
had been in when it started to ebb. He
wiped his hand on the back of the other seat.
As his breathing returned to normal, he grabbed the apple that had
rolled out of his lunch bag into the tuna goo.
Wiping it off calmed him further.

When the pounding
in his ears lessened, he heard a scratching sound through the open window. He
rose on wobbly legs, but had no view of what the cat was doing on the other
side of the door.

“Just leave it,
Jeff,” he muttered to himself. “It can’t hurt you from the other side.
Curiosity killed the-“

Scratch, scratch.

“Oh, for fuck’s
sake.”

Jeff staggered out
to the aisle. Laboring through exhausting steps in a lilting car, he finally
emerged through the quicksand of the aisleway. Leaning against the door, he
peered through the plexiglass window.

The cat was
wrapped around the cable connecting this car to the rest of the train. Its back was lodged against the ball hitch, front
claws imbedded in the thick plastic. Its powerful back legs kicked with the
force and pace of a jackhammer.

While the cat was
occupied with this futile endeavor, Jeff thought now was a good time to make a
dash for the other car and safety. He
could even kick the cat onto the tracks en route.

He pushed the rectangle
in the middle of the door. Nothing happened.

He pushed again. He
slapped, punched, pounded the button, but the door would not budge. Turning his body sideways to slam his
shoulder into door, he finally noticed freshly-sliced wires coming out of a
control panel, underneath a bright red button printed “Override.”

Jeff staggered
back. He told himself that the cat could not cut through the cable, but his
panic started to rise. Then the train
entered another tunnel.

Jeff dashed toward
the back, but only made it two steps before crashing over an armrest. He sprawled out onto the floor of the cabin,
smashing his temple onto hard plastic on the way down. By the time he could re-focus, the waning
afternoon sunshine was back.

The cat was back
in the car, perched on the armrest of the first seat, haunches arced in the
classic Halloween pose. The sound
emanating from it was a low, guttural growl mixed with a hiss.

“Look, cat, you
can have your seat. Just let me the hell out of here.”

The cat continued
its odd sound, now mixed with a dash of purring. Jeff backed up on the floor of
the aisle, cowering into a seat alcove. His right hand brushed against the
apple, which must have rolled out when he fell in the darkness.

Flight instinct
turned desperately to fight. He fired a perfect fastball at the cat, who deftly
jumped aside. The apple sped through the air above the recently vacated armrest
and slammed into the red button beside the locked door.

Brakes squealed
and the car heaved, slamming Jeff toward the front. A myriad of sounds and sensations assaulted
his mind. The smell of brake fluid and hot steel as wheels locked onto
tracks. The sound of frayed and shredded
plastic snapping as ten full-speed train cars broke away from the braking final
car. The shaking of a car that couldn’t
decide if it should shatter where it stood or graciously fall off the track.

One sight stayed
with him: a grey alley cat with black stripes, jaundiced eyes and black-slit
pupils staring down from the open window.
He closed his eyes, struggled to open them again. The cat turned its
tail and leapt free from the train. Then
his world went black.